The sycophancy of Brian Sibley permeates every line of this repetitive and inelegant hagiography of New Zealand’s foremost cinematic fantasist. As a whole, the book feels like a sorry excuse for Sibley to spend the best part of 500 exclamation mark-heavy pages equating the minutiae of Jackson’s early life to the work he was eventually to do on ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy. By the thousandth time you’ve read a phrase along the lines of ‘…and little did he know, years later that same extra would be fashioning Orc helmets on “The Lord of the Rings” films’, you’ll be tearing out clumps of hair.
Inevitably, the most interesting section deals with his four-year struggle to make the low-budget splatter film ‘Bad Taste’: it’s a testament to Jackson’s charm that he convinced the New Zealand Film Council to part-finance a film about a man with a flap in the back of his head from which large chunks of brain matter constantly ooze. And yet, with each film he covers (including ‘Meet the Feebles’, ‘King Kong’ and, arguably his best work, ‘Heavenly Creatures’), you feel as if Sibley is only skimming the surface, with the director’s own comments, lazily block-quoted between paragraphs, restricted to how he did things, not why he did them or how he felt about them.
Perhaps this type of fact-heavy, insight-light biog is a symptom of our DVD commentary-obsessed times where the need to know which celebrities were visiting the set on a certain day overshadows bigger questions. Jackson deserves better.
